“The act of writing, even if the product consists of only a hundred and forty characters composed with one’s thumbs, forces a kind of real-time distillation of emotional chaos.” Researchers have confirmed the efficacy of writing as a therapeutic intervention.
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views
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The trainer stressed the importance of avoiding teen patois and not making typos, which undermine authoritativeness.
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Having all three factors present in a school can compensate for their absence in the family, community, or peer group. And a school with these factors can be resilient as an organization in the face of challenges and traumatic events it may face.
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But in practical terms, text messaging affords a level of privacy that the human voice makes impossible. If you’re hiding from an abusive relative or you just don’t want your classmates to know how overwhelmed you feel about applying to college, a text message, even one sent in public, is safer than a phone call.
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What’s more, tears go undetected by the person you’ve reached out to, and you don’t have to hear yourself say aloud your most shameful secrets.”
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All people have the capacity for resilience, she says, and there are three factors that tap and nurture that potential: (a) caring relationships, (b) high expectations, and (c) meaningful opportunities for participation and contribution.
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The three factors help develop children’s social competence, problem-solving ability, sense of self and internal locus of control, and sense of purpose and optimism about the future – all of which are key to dealing successfully with adversity.
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The advantage of using texting for a crisis hotline is that teens who are willfully uncommunicative when speaking are often forthcoming to the point of garrulous when texting, quite willing to disclose sensitive information.
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This is all about providing a sense of connectedness and belonging, “being there,” showing compassion and trust.
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Teachers make appropriate expectations clear and recognize progress as well as performance. They also encourage mindfulness and self-awareness of moods, thinking, and actions. Principals orchestrate a curriculum that is challenging, comprehensive, thematic, experiential, and inclusive of multiple perspectives. They also provide training in resilience and youth development, and work to change deeply held adult beliefs about students’ capacities.
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Teachers hold daily class meetings and empower students to create classroom norms and agreements. Principals establish peer-helping/tutoring and cross-age mentoring/tutoring programs and set up peer support networks to help new students and families acclimate to the school environment.
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Resilience is a process, not a trait. It’s a struggle to define oneself as healthy amidst serious challenges.
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Several personal strengths are associated with resilience – being strong cognitively, socially, emotionally, morally, and spiritually.
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In classrooms, open channels of communication are essential. Nothing should inhibit, embarrass, or shame students from asking questions during a lesson.
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To help others, educators need to take care of themselves. An analogy: on an airplane, people need to have their own oxygen masks in place before they can help others.
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ome have pointed out that the report applies mostly to a small percent of students, and what colleges say they value may be a challenge to game the system.
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“The admissions process can counteract a narrow focus on personal success and promote in young people a greater appreciation of others and the common good.
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Julie Coiro (University of Rhode Island) takes note of a large international study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which found that computers were having no significant impact on students’ proficiency in reading, math, and science.
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In many countries, the study found, frequent use of computers actually made students’ performance worse. “Although these findings may relate to differences in professional development or implementation,” says Coiro, “it was clear that drill-and-practice software had a negative effect on student performance.”
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Technology is not critical for learning to be personal; all that’s needed is space and time to actively reflect, collaborate, and engage with personally meaningful ideas.
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“What students can learn,” says Stygles, “is how to manage their time, select books reasonably, and justify their reading choices. When students understand their capacity – what they can do successfully – they not only protect themselves from shameful failure, but also become stronger readers through repeated experiences of success and pleasure.”
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when blended learning is implemented in a balanced way, “teachers and students use a range of human and digital resources to improve their ability to think, problem solve, collaborate, and communicate. A delicate balance of talk and technology use keeps us all grounded in conversations with other people about what really matters.” Coiro has four suggestions for striking this balance: • Build a culture of personal inquiry. Students have regular opportunities to pursue topics relevant to them, using a range of texts, tools, and people (offline and online) to get emotionally engaged. • Expect learners to talk. Students engage in literacy experiences involving face-to-face and online collaboration, conversations, arguments, negotiations, and presentations. • Encourage digital creation. Students create original products that share new knowledge and connect insights from school, home, and the community. • Make space for students to participate and matter. “Through participation, individuals assert their autonomy and ownership of learning,” says Coiro. “In turn, their inquiry becomes more personal and engaging.”
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Once students are empowered to direct their own learning pathways, technology can open the door to a range of texts, tools, and people to explore and connect ideas
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“Unlike participation in sports,” says Stygles, “the choice to abandon reading to pursue other talents is not an option. Kids really have no escape from the struggles they face during the learning-to-read process, especially in light of frequent assessment or graduation through levels.”
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“Measurement must be replaced by early and frequent positive transactions between reading, teacher, and texts,”
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We should share with students what intimidates us about reading, how we find time, and how we focus… If we show our readers realities of reading, maturing students will see reading as less burdensome.”
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“A good exit ticket can tell whether students have a superficial or in-depth understanding of the material,” they write. “Teachers can then use this data for adapting instruction to meet students’ needs the very next day… Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched in the classroom…
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The key to differentiation is that you have high expectations for all students and a clear objective.
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If you know what you want students to master, differentiation allows you to use different strategies to help all students get there.”
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Each of these tools allows students to contribute individually to shared creations involving inquiry, peer feedback, and collaborative composition.
Talks to watch with kids | Playlist | TED.com - 0 views
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Why Daydreaming is Critical to Effective Learning | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views
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daydreaming creativity brain breaks multitasking learning
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It’s never too early to learn smart strategies to focus in on priorities and tune out what’s not immediately necessary.
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Neuroscience has shown that multitasking — the process of doing more than one thing at the same time — doesn’t exist.
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Multitasking is also stressful for the body. When people try to do several things at once, like drive and text, the brain uses up oxygenated glucose at a much faster rate and releases the stress hormone cortisol.
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Rather than trying to do everything at the same time, the most productive people prioritize and block off their schedules to focus on one task at a time.
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“When they’re doing something, they’re really doing it,” Levitin said. “They get more done because their brain isn’t half somewhere else.”
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“People who take regular breaks — and naps even — end up being more productive and more creative in their work,” Levitin said.
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“You need to give your brain time to consolidate all the information that’s come in, to toss it and turn it.”
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The brain has a natural way of giving itself a break — it’s called daydreaming. “It allows you to refresh and release all those neural circuits that get all bound up when you’re focused,”
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“Children shouldn’t be overly scheduled,” Levitin said. “They should have blocks of time to promote spontaneity and creativity.”
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Daydreaming and playing are crucial to develop the kind of creativity many say should be a focal point of a modern education system.
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The world has changed much more quickly than the genome can keep up with, which means schools have a responsibility to help kids develop the skills to sift through the overwhelming stimuli.
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It can be hard to focus on one thing when there’s a long, nagging list of things that need to get done in a day, both personal and professional. Levitin recommends writing all those things down on notecards, externalizing the memories into digestible bits that can be shuffled as priorities change. “My brain knows I’ve written it down and it stops nagging me,” Levitin said of his method.
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he hyperactive child might be able to help develop a more creative set of ideas, while the more focused child knows how to take that idea
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Alexa Helps With Homework, But Problem-Solving Skills Are Key : NPR - 0 views
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Still, he agrees that this debate is about much more than knowing what 5 minus 3 is. It's also about developing the patience to solve problems. "That ability to stay focused," he says, "particularly when something is not interesting, is one of the most important developmental skills that children acquire." In other words, it's not just about having the answers. It's about the work you put in to get them.
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shared by Jill Bergeron on 18 Apr 17
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views
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21st century skills critical thinking problem solving PLC program evaluation pd professional development reading literacy vocabulary bullying bullying prevention art arts education creativity character education movement
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students who have four years of art score 91 points higher on the SAT than students who don’t.
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Danny Gregory applauds the arguments made for the importance of art and music in schools: they improve motor, spatial, and language skills; they enhance peer collaboration; they strengthen ties to the community; they keep at-risk students in school and improve their chances of ultimately graduating from college; and
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In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes.
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In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”
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Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success.
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Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful – these are the skills that matter in the 21st century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop it. A great artist is also a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.”
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We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it.
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A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred: - 42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls); - 34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit); - 22 percent in cafeterias; - 19 percent outside on school grounds; - 12 percent online or by text; - 10 percent on school buses; - 9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.
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hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”
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students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods.
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Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.
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Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.
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– The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.
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– To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.
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Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students
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How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis.
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a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives: Cognitive skills: - Recall - Application - Analysis - Evaluation - Creative thinking Interpersonal skills: - Communication - Cooperation - Empathy - Trust building - Service orientation - Conflict resolution - Negotiation - Responsibility - Assertiveness - Advocacy Intrapersonal skills: - Flexibility - Adaptability - Appreciation of diversity - Valuing learning - Cultural appreciation - Curiosity - Forethought - Self-regulation - Self-monitoring - Self-evaluation
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Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application
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These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”
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It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.
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In a 10th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended.
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These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.
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to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”
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Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.
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First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators.
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Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes.
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“In education, getting better generally means having a more positive influence on the learning of our students and helping more students learn well,” says Guskey. “Knowing our destination provides the basis for determining the effectiveness of our efforts.”
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Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support: - Engage – The class is given a math task or activity. - Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration. - Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed. - Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track. - Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.
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“Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,”
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What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts.
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“The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”
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One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”
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“When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics.
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researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better.
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What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish? - What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data) - What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?
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“[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly.
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Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.
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Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught. • Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words. • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough. • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.
310: How to Reduce Drama With Kids - 0 views
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Coronavirus: Close the bars. Reopen the schools. - Vox - 0 views
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Reopening is a community-wide project. Whether a school can reopen safely, for example, doesn’t just depend on capacity, personal protective equipment, or individual actions. It depends on how widespread the coronavirus is in the community outside the school’s walls.
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But if a community is flooded with infections, the chances are much higher that those infections will creep in no matter how many protective steps are embraced.
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If you want to reopen schools this fall, then you need to get the spread of Covid-19 down, as close to zero as possible, this summer. And that means opting not to reopen — possibly at all and definitely not at full capacity — restaurants, bars, nightclubs, or other places that will lead to significantly more coronavirus spread but have less value to society than schools.
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The goal is to keep the basic reproduction number in a community below 1. That would mean that every person who gets coronavirus transmits it to, on average, fewer than one other person. Over time, that would lead to coronavirus cases falling closer and closer to zero. This number is typically calculated as the R0 or Rt, depending on the methods used. (Some websites, like Rt.live, calculate this figure for all states, and it’s at 1 or more in most states.)
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schools likely carry some risk of Covid-19 transmission, as an indoor environment in which students, teachers, and other school staff interact for hours. But schools are also really important for day-to-day life — not just for kids’ education, but also for food, shelter, and child care while parents are at work. Knowing that, a community may decide to fit schools into its reopening budget. The trade-off would be that other places, such as restaurants, bars, or gyms, more likely have to remain closed.
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NAIS - Affirming the Well-Being of Black Teachers - 0 views
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the necessity of emotional support in our schools through affinity groups and the need for culturally responsive professional development opportunities similar to ones offered at the NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC).
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In her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Tatum outlines a familiar circumstance that many Black faculty face when working in PWIs. “Particularly in work settings, where people of color are isolated and often in the extreme minority, the opportunities to connect with peers of color are few and far between. White people are often unaware of how stressful such a situation can be.”
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As confirmed in my research findings, affinity groups are one of the few places in PWIs where Black faculty and staff expressed a genuine sense of recognition and appreciation. Affinity groups provide teachers who share a common identity at our school the opportunity to meet, connect, and support each other. The Black affinity group gatherings at our school can range from informal check-ins to more structured and facilitated conversations about stress management and teaching practices. As important as these meetings are, they are unfortunately infrequent.
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Another participant described affinity groups as “a space where I can say the things I need to say, you know, and be who I am and not have to couch it.” This kind of comfort can be a critical emotional lifeline for Black teachers.
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If leadership at PWIs hopes to stem the tide of attrition among Black faculty, they need to invest in a consistent approach to professional development that is not reactionary.
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I’ve established healthy boundaries, such as acknowledging that it’s not always my responsibility to coach my white colleagues through their misconceptions about race or Black folks.
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It can be inefficient and, at times, ineffective to wait for our institutions to “make time” for us, so I had to find and build a support system at my school. Casual meetings for lunch, BIPOC group chats, and guidance from more experienced Black faculty and school leaders have helped me find a balance.
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I hope school leaders will make it a priority to improve the teaching experience of their Black faculty by intentionally budgeting more time for supportive gatherings like affinity groups and providing more culturally responsive professional development opportunities to sustain teachers throughout the year.
Middle School Issues: Challenges Kids with ADHD Will Face - 0 views
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Teaching Self Advocacy & Building Independence: Strategies for Students with ADHD - 0 views
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Many parents of students with ADHD wonder how to strike the elusive balance that offers support and encourages independent self-advocacy skills.
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Enabling is doing something for someone else, without a plan to help them do it for themselves. Supporting is providing guidance and encouragement to someone as they learn to manage the task on their own in time.
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ask them questions that help them reflect on things like completing homework, preparing for tests, and participating in class.
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For each of these skills, ask your child to rate themselves from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). This encourages them to distinguish their different abilities in different areas, and helps them move away from all-or-nothing thinking
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Telling Your Child They Have a Learning Disability Is Critical - 0 views
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explanation learning differences disabilities parenting
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Many parents are afraid that “labeling” a child as having a learning disability will make him feel broken, left out, or less willing to try. In fact, the opposite is true: giving your child an understanding of the nature of his learning disabilities will comfort him — and motivate him to push through his challenges.
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The knowledge that he has an identifiable, common, measurable, and treatable condition often comes as great comfort to the youngster. Without this information, the child is likely to believe the taunts of his classmates and feel that he indeed is a dummy.
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If a child does not have a basic understanding of the nature of his learning challenges, it is unlikely that he will be able to sustain his motivation in the classroom.
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During these discussions, emphasize her strengths and affinities, and do not simply focus on her weaknesses and difficulties. Express optimism about her development and her future.
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Remind your child that she can indeed learn, but that she learns in a unique way that requires her to work hard and participate in classes and activities that are different from those of her peers and siblings.
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Print Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest A parent once called my special education school to request an admissions visit for her and her son, who was struggling mightily in school. She asked a strange question in her initial phone call: “Does the school have any signs or posters displayed that identify the program as a school for kids with learning disabilities?” I asked her why she wished to know this. She replied, “My son doesn’t know that he has a learning disability, and we don’t want him to know.” He knows, Mom. Believe me, he knows.
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Students Are Making a 'Surprising' Rebound From Pandemic Closures. But Some May Never C... - 0 views
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Elementary and middle-school students have made up significant ground since pandemic school closings in 2020 — but they are nowhere close to being fully caught up, according to the first detailed national study of how much U.S. students are recovering.
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Overall in math, a subject where learning loss has been greatest, students have made up about a third of what they lost. In reading, they have made up a quarter, according to the new analysis of standardized test score data led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard.
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Still, the gap between students from rich and poor communities — already huge before the pandemic — has widened.
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because poor districts had lost more ground, their progress was not nearly enough to outpace wealthier districts, widening the gulf between them.
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“We seemed to have lost the urgency in this crisis,” said Karyn Lewis, who has studied pandemic learning declines for NWEA, a research and student assessment group. “It is problematic for the average kid.
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“But it’s an unevenly felt recovery,” Professor Reardon said, “so the worry there is that means inequality is getting baked in.”
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When looking at data available in 15 states, researchers found that in a given district — poor or rich — children across backgrounds lost similar ground, but students from richer families recovered faster.
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Even when schools offered interventions to help students catch up, lower-income families might have been less able to rearrange schedules or transportation to ensure their children attended. (This is one reason experts advise scheduling tutoring during the school day, not after.)
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Take Massachusetts, which has some of the nation’s best math and reading scores, but wide inequality. The recovery there was led by wealthier districts. Test scores for students in poor districts have shown little improvement, and in some cases, kept falling, leaving Massachusetts with one of the largest increases in the achievement gap.
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In states like Kentucky and Tennessee that have traditionally had more middling test scores, but with less inequality, poor students have recovered remarkably well.